William Motter Inge was an American playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, including Picnic, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize.
Background
Inge was born on May 3, 1913, in Independence, Kansas, United States, the fifth child of Maude Sarah Gibson-Inge and Luther Clay Inge. Because his father was away so often, Inge, a shy and introspective child, and his four siblings were reared mainly by his domineering, puritanical mother, with whom he had a very close relationship.
Education
Inge attended Montgomery County High School (1926-1930) and the University of Kansas in Lawrence, majoring in speech and drama. He wrote the script for an annual college musical, acted in touring Toby shows (a comic tent show featuring a farm boy named Toby) during the summers, and, after gaining his B. A. in 1935, began teaching at Culver Military Academy in Indiana.
His wish to move to New York City and become an actor was diverted by financial problems, so he entered graduate school at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, on a scholarship, but left shortly before graduation when he suffered a nervous collapse.
He subsequently completed his M. A. degree (1938) by writing a thesis on director-playwright David Belasco.
Career
Upon regaining his health, Inge worked as a radio scriptwriter and announcer in Wichita while acting in amateur theater companies. After a case of stage fright forced him to abandon acting, he turned to teaching English, first at a Kansas high school and then for five years (1938 - 1943) at Stephens College for Women in Columbia, Missouri, where he also taught theater. From 1943 to 1946 he was the arts and literature critic for the St. Louis Star-Times, and from 1946 to 1949 he taught at Washington College in St. Louis.
During his stint as a journalist he interviewed playwright Tennessee Williams, with whom he became friendly and had a brief homosexual love affair. Williams's Glass Menagerie (1945) inspired Inge to write plays himself. Williams helped Inge get his first play, Farther Off from Heaven (1947), produced in Dallas.
His initial success persuaded Inge to give up teaching, which he disliked, and become a professional dramatist. He moved to New York City in 1949. His heavy drinker's experience was transmuted into his first Broadway play, the gloomy Come Back, Little Sheba (1950; film version, 1952), with brilliant performances by Shirley Booth and Sidney Blackmer as Lola and Doc, a midwestern housewife and her alcoholic husband. Worry over the production, which ultimately ran for 190 performances after it received mostly good reviews, took a heavy toll on Inge, who had to be hospitalized for a serious nervous condition worsened by drinking.
His next Broadway play, Picnic (1953; film version, 1955), earlier called Front Porch and Summer Brave. A much-revised version of the play, retitled Summer Brave, was published in 1962.
Another hit followed. Bus Stop (1955; film version, 1956) was a comedy-drama concerning the romantic encounter of a saloon singer and rodeo cowpoke in a Kansas City diner during a snowstorm. This reworking of Inge's one-act play, People in the Wind, ran for 478 performances on Broadway and evidenced his ability to portray lonely and frustrated small-town characters.
Inge refashioned another early work, Farther Off from Heaven, into The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957; film version, 1960). After this success, he experienced many severe setbacks. A Loss of Roses (1959; film version, The Stripper, 1963), Inge's most explicit grappling with his relationship with his mother, failed after 25 performances. Negative critical reviews deeply wounded him.
He worked off some of his despair writing his first movie script, Splendor in the Grass (1961), for which he won an Oscar. This success - Inge's only one during these final years - prompted him to move to California. He wrote the film version of James Lepo Herlihy's All Fall Down (1962). Another film script remained unproduced, and he was so dissatisfied with Bus Riley's Back in Town (1965) that he used a pseudonym on the credits. At the same time, his Broadway plays Natural Affection (1963) and Where's Daddy? (1966) both flopped. Inge hoped to avoid thematically loaded plays, trying instead to write in a way that would enrich people's lives via their encounters with the human experiences he depicted.
In his later years, he taught playwriting at various colleges in California. His play Overnight (1969) was produced by a university group but was never published. He did publish several one-act plays and two novels, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1971) and My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971), an autobiographical novel about an English professor recalling his early years. Inge's experiences nurtured a deeply cynical attitude that pervaded his later writing.
In 1973, Inge was sure he would never write again. He grew so despondent over his failures that he killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning in Los Angeles.
Personality
A heavy drinker, Inge had joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1948. Yet Inge continued to endure depression stemming from a lack of self-confidence. His depression - part of it stemming from his discomfort with his homosexuality - grew so intense and debilitating that later in his life, one of his sisters had to live with and care for him.
Inge had a talent for composing authentic everyday dialogue that captured the flavor of the Midwest.
Quotes from others about the person
R. Baird Shuman notes that Inge wrote about "love, and the highest expression of love as Inge sees it often comes when someone realizes that nonjudgmental, accepting love is the only kind that really endures. It is this sort of love that brings the main characters in many of Inge's plays a sense of ultimate fulfillment. "